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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient William J. Brennan
" All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance -- unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment ]."
The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to “create” rights. Rather they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
Brennan: An 'American Hero'
Mourners pay their respects Monday as the former justice lay in state at the Supreme Court.
(By Dayna Smith -- The Washington Post)
July 29, 1997
The procession that filed around the flag-draped coffin of retired Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan had, by afternoon, included friends and relatives, union guys, troops of Boy Scouts, tourists in T-shirts, men and women in suits and a lot of devoted and anonymous disciples.
In the court’s Great Hall, where Brennan’s coffin was on display yesterday, this cross-section of Americans silently paid tribute to a man known to many as a champion of individual rights. The reasons for their attendance varied from the eminently practical--it was very hot and humid and the court is an air-conditioned tourist attraction--to the profoundly moving.
Justice Brennan, center, speaks with Justice Harry Blackman, left, and Justice John Paul Stevens during a 1987 case about the authorship of Shakespeare's works. (AP File Photo)
"I am a woman. I am black. What more can I say?" said Tiffany Graham, 23, a paralegal at the Justice Department who will enter law school at the University of Virginia in the fall. Graham said Brennan’s forceful opinions on the rights of minorities, including women, had a direct and lasting influence on her life. "I wouldn’t have the advantages I have now," she said. "He was truly an American hero, and I came here to pay my respects, to say thank you."
Such high praise was common outside the Marble Palace--"his permanent memorial," as the Rev. Milton Jordan called the building during a brief private ceremony before Brennan’s family and friends.
Justice Brennan, right, shakes hands with President Eisenhower at the White House in 1956. Eisenhower had just selected Brennan to be a Supreme Court Justice. (AP File Photo)
Brennan, who was 90 when he died Thursday, believed the courts should try to right social wrongs, and his success in forging a consensus on divisive issues has had a profound effect.
People who did not know Brennan but knew his work cited specific cases that expanded civil liberties and freedom of the press, or they mentioned his adamant opposition to capital punishment.
Some, such as Jim Lyle, volunteered their own political party affiliation and philosophical bent, making it clear they saw Brennan as an unfailing liberal ally and one, perhaps, impossible to replace.
Lyle, a law student from Columbus, Ohio, said most people probably did not recognize the scope and reach of Brennan’s work. "These things affect you throughout your life, even though you don’t realize it," Lyle said of the justice’s opinions, particularly those that enhanced civil liberties. "The decisions that he made, the stances he took, the influences he had on the court, his ability to sway, to use arguments on other justices--all this I think was unique to the man."
President Clinton presents Justice Brennan with the Medal of Freedom in November, 1993, at the White House. (AP)
Funeral services for Brennan will be held today at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where Washington’s power brokers will pay public tribute before Brennan is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. By comparison, yesterday’s viewing was much more informal and democratic, drawing many from less-exalted positions in official Washington, people who knew Brennan’s work well from the inside.
There was Laura Millman, a special master with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, who said Brennan "stood for positions that would make this country great." And there was Rebecca Dickinson, a lawyer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who called Brennan a hero. "He was one of the greatest minds in the last 100 years," Dickinson said. "I don’t think people realize how much they owe to him."
No one ventured to say what Brennan would have said about the adulation. Born to Irish immigrants who settled in Newark--his father worked as a coal heaver in a brewery before finding success in America--William Joseph Brennan Jr. had the kind of upbringing that lots of people can identify with. He was one of eight children and, as a boy, earned pocket money by delivering milk, pumping gas and making change for passengers awaiting trolleys.
People like Joe Sweeny, a history teacher and union activist from Upstate New York, can relate to that. Standing on the court steps with his 8-year-old son, Robert, Sweeny called the immigrants’ son a "champion of individual rights, an impossible man to replace."
In 1956, Justice Brennan holds his 7-year-old daughter, Nancy, as his wife, Marjorie, holds his robe. (AP File Photo)
The coffin was brought in at 10 a.m., past 27 of Brennan’s former law clerks. Dozens of Boy Scouts visiting the Capitol stood across the street from the court, many at attention. By 4:30 p.m., 2,300 people had filed past the coffin.
Among them were Harry Lemmon, a justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, and his wife, Mary Ann Lemmon, a federal judge in Louisiana. They met Brennan in France in 1988 and became friends. Yesterday, the Lemmons remembered a man who would literally reach out, gently grabbing you by the arm to make a point. "He was the kind of person that everyone felt was a close friend," Harry Lemmon said.
And then there was the assessment of Rachel Simon, 7, who did not know anything about Brennan until her parents, Ken and Sabrina Simon, took her and her two siblings to the viewing. Inside, Sabrina Simon--a lawyer, like her husband--knelt to whisper in her daughter’s ear. She told her "a great person had died and people were showing their respect."
The Simons, who are black, moved from the District to Birmingham. Ken Simon, a former White House fellow, said Birmingham and the South are different now from the way they were in the 1960s--for the better. The implication was that Brennan helped make that possible.
On the steps of the Supreme Court, defined once by Oliver Wendell Holmes as having "the quiet of a storm center," Rachel Simon said, "I think it was pretty bad for somebody who was really great to die."
'The Biggest Heart in the Building' By Joan Biskupic
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 25, 1997
Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. was remembered yesterday as a bulwark of liberal activism whose effect on America is so great -- and his personality so compelling -- that even those who disagreed with his views said much of his legacy will endure.
Brennan "played a major role in shaping American constitutional law," said conservative Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. "He was also a warm-hearted colleague to those of us who served with him."
"He had the biggest heart of anyone in the building," said Thurgood Marshall Jr., son of the late justice. "Justice Brennan was not just my father's closest and dearest partner but his hero in the pursuit of equality and justice."
Marshall, President Clinton's Cabinet secretary, said his father and Brennan could not have been more different as people, given the backgrounds from which they emerged. "But they both believed fervently in the very same ideals."
News of Brennan's death, coming shortly after noon yesterday, spread quickly among former colleagues and friends. He was known for the force of his opinions -- more than 1,000 -- that embodied the notion that the federal courts should actively seek to right society's wrongs. He was venerated yesterday for his persuasive approach and good humor, and for a charisma that will help him be remembered for generations.
"There are few people who are truly extraordinary and we don't always know the reasons why they rise above the rest of us. But he did," U.S. appeals court judge Richard S. Arnold of Little Rock, who was a law clerk to Brennan in 1960, said yesterday. "His chief characteristics were kindness and love -- to everybody."
Brennan, who retired from the court in 1990 and initially kept up professional and personal contacts, had been in poor health in recent months. He died at a nursing home in Arlington, where he had been rehabilitating after he broke his hip in November.
A court spokeswoman said Brennan's body would lie in state from 10:30 a.m. until 10 p.m. Monday at the Supreme Court Building. His funeral is set for 10 a.m. Tuesday at St. Mathews Catholic Church in the District.
All quarters of government reacted to word of Brennan's death. Clinton, who said Brennan's "devotion to the Bill of Rights inspired millions of Americans and countless young law students, including myself," ordered flags flown at half-staff at government buildings, military facilities and U.S. embassies worldwide.
In addition to Rehnquist, three other of Brennan's former court colleagues issued statements of admiration yesterday.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who sat with Brennan for 15 years and shared some of his liberal views, said, "The blend of wisdom, humor, love and learning that Justice Brennan shared with his colleagues -- indeed with all those privileged to know him -- was truly unique. He was a great man and a warm friend."
"Justice Brennan's death means the passing of an era in the history of the Supreme Court," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said. "In addition to the remarkable legal legacy he left behind, he left a legacy of friendship and good will wherever he went."
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said, "Justice Brennan was one of the great friends of freedom, freedom for those who have it and freedom for those who yet must seek it."
Justice Antonin Scalia, who strongly disagreed with Brennan's liberal approach, nonetheless once called Brennan "probably the most influential justice of the century" and "the intellectual leader of the movement that really changed, fundamentally, the court's approach toward the Constitution."
Joshua E. Rosenkranz, a 1987-88 clerk who is now executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said, "I would be willing to bet that there is not a single person in our nation who hasn't been touched by Justice Brennan's legacy, whether they know it or not."
Attorney General Janet Reno said she was sad to hear Brennan had died and added: "Justice Brennan stood up for people who had no choice. He devoted his long, rich life to helping the American justice system live up to its ideals. He made a difference, and he will be remembered always by all Americans who prize the rule of law."
Brennan: A Legacy of Liberty By Nat Hentoff
Washington Post Columnist
Tuesday, July 29, 1997
We had been talking about the increasing number of dissents he was writing on the Rehnquist court, and I asked Justice Brennan whether he was getting discouraged. I should have known better. He smiled and said the court had these cycles, but it would come around again. He paused and added, "Look, pal, we've always known -- the Framers knew -- that liberty is a fragile thing. You can't give up."
Then William Brennan quoted from a scene in Yeats's play "Cathleen ni Houlihan": " 'Did you see an old woman going down the path?' asks Bridget. 'I did not,' replies Patrick, who came into the house just after the old woman left it. 'But I saw a young girl and she had the walk of a queen.' "
Justice Brennan looked fondly into the distance. "That passage has always meant a great deal to me."
His conviction remained that the living, evolving Constitution -- not frozen in time more than 200 years ago -- will surely rejuvenate liberty in the decades ahead. After all, despite the best years of the Warren court -- when Brennan was its defining force -- so much had been left undone even then. Let alone since.
Eleven years ago, he said in a speech, "We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses. . . . Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of our nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle."
For all his passionate concern about injustice across the board, Justice Brennan was not a flinty moralist in person. Talking to him, as I frequently did during his last years on the court, I felt entirely at ease in the presence of one of the most powerful figures in the nation. He had no side, as the British say. Genuinely curious about the interests of people he talked to, he was the most naturally friendly person I have ever known.
Brennan was also interested in what happened to some of the litigants in cases he had judged. For instance, Harry Keyishian, an instructor who had been fired because he would not sign a New York state loyalty oath.
Brennan, in that 1967 case, Keyishian v. Board of Regents of New York, had ruled that the loyalty oath and other anti-subversive New York state statutes violated First Amendment protections of academic freedom.
Twenty years later, Keyishian was on a televised Bill Moyers series, "In Search of the Constitution." I saw Brennan at the court soon after the program aired, and he was excited at having seen the actual person behind the name on his decision.
"It was fascinating," Brennan told me. "It was the first time I had seen him. Of course, it's rare that I ever see the people in the cases we deal with. Hearing him on the television program, I had no idea that he and the other teachers would have lost everything they had ever done if the case had gone the other way."
To Brennan the law was more than briefs and oral arguments. He may have seen hardly any of the litigants before him, but he searched for a sense of them in the cases that reached him. Whenever he was asked for his definition of the Constitution, his answer was: "The protection of the dignity of the human being and the recognition that every individual has fundamental rights which government cannot deny him."
That's why Brennan had so deep and abiding a revulsion against capital punishment. Execution by the state, he said, "treats members of the human race as non-humans. Even the vilest criminal remains a human being possessed of common human dignity."
By contrast, no one on the present court has refused, as Brennan did, to be an accomplice in what Harry Blackman called "the machinery of death." And it is difficult to imagine that anyone now nominated to the court by a president of either party could get Senate approval if he or she were against the death penalty.
When Justice Brennan retired seven years ago, he said it was "the saddest day of his life." It was sad for the nation as well, even though relatively few Americans knew anything more about him than his name -- if that.
Brennan, having a quick sense of humor, appreciated irony. He might have savored the president's tribute to him when he died: "Justice Brennan's devotion to the Bill of Rights inspired countless young law students, including myself."
Like Bill Clinton's evisceration of habeas corpus? His persistent devotion to the death penalty? His ardent advocacy of greatly expanded FBI wiretaping powers? Justice Brennan's legacy included none of these, but the president does confirm Brennan's conviction that liberty is indeed a fragile thing.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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Medal History
